Linguistic and graphic manipulation in the miscellaneous forms of traditional Chinese poetry

The miscellaneous forms of poetry (MFP) this dissertation addresses refer to a large body of traditional Chinese poems that involve witty linguistic or graphic manipulations. Examples of these poems are: poems with unusual syntactic structure; poems required to contain or composed of particular words; poems with unusual phonetic features; poems that play with the graphic structure of characters and graphic textual formation. These poems emerged in the Six-Dynasties Era (220--589), matured in the Tang and Song dynasties, and flourished throughout the Ming and Qing dynasties. Because of their special formal or structural features, these poems caught the attention of literary commentators from the time they first appeared. However, these poems have not been systematically examined and seriously evaluated until the past few years, and they remain largely unknown to English readers. This dissertation collects poems in this genre from all kinds of classical and modern sources, classifies them with consistent criteria, and analyzes their formal features and themes. This dissertation proposes that MFP should not be read with the standard for reading the main forms of poems because in the latter, the physical images of the linguistic signs (characters) do not matter, while MFP make use of not only the images of the characters and their sound effect, but also "loopholes" in the grammatical structure and parts of speech. MFP are a combination of linguistic art and graphic art. The formal techniques experimented with MFP are also useful for the main forms of Chinese poetry. MFP make us rethink the role of form in poetry, and let us see that the Chinese writing system plays many important supralinguistic roles in Chinese culture.